


I do not hope to know again

by ncfan



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Bruce's trauma should really have its own character tag, Canon Speculation, First Meetings, Friendship, Gen, Hangover, Mild Spoilers, Psychological Trauma, References to Backstory, Sort-of, Speculation for Season 4B, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-19
Updated: 2018-03-07
Packaged: 2019-02-17 05:45:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13070355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: One morning while hungover, Bruce makes a friend. Sort of.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Based on [this post](http://ncfan-1.tumblr.com/post/168453616027/i-probably-shouldnt-hope-for-this-since-pulling). I would love for this to happen in Season 4B, but I feel like it probably won’t—at least, not anything like this.
> 
> A few notes: One is that I don’t drink and I’ve never been drunk, so my depiction of drunk!Bruce may or may not be an accurate depiction of how someone feels when they’re drunk. The second regards Bruce and Jonathan’s characterizations. The way Bruce is, I think the way he acts around his new friends is probably at least partly a front, and that when he isn’t around them, and isn’t around someone he’s feeling hostile towards right now (like Alfred), he might act rather differently. (And Bruce’s attitudes towards the poor are… He’s trying. Let’s just put it like that.) As for Jonathan, I haven’t seen enough of him on _Gotham_ to guess how he’d behave when interacting with someone he doesn’t hate, so this is speculation. What I do think is that, however he might have acted in ‘The Fear Reaper’, he probably isn’t running around Gotham in full costume, calling himself the Scarecrow. However incompetent the GCPD might be, I like to think they’d have caught him by now if he was.
> 
> And look! I managed to pull a title from T.S. Eliot’s work that _wasn’t_ from ‘The Waste Land.’ (It’s from ‘Ash-Wednesday.’)

Though legal niceties prevented him from admitting to being in the company of people who drank, Bruce Wayne had certainly heard of people who didn’t drink alcohol for the taste. When he was very young, he had snuck into a few of his parents’ parties, those that were held at Wayne Manor, anyways. Then, it was a matter of crawling under the table without being kicked or otherwise found out. He usually found his mother’s legs (recognizable from her shoes—well, apart from that one time one of the guests had come to a party wearing the same shoes as her) and sat by them. His father would have scolded him if he had known Bruce was out of bed, but if his mother found him hiding there, she just might sneak him some of the food from the party table. Bruce learned a great deal from listening to people talk, though later experiences would tell him that he’d not learned nearly as much as he needed to.

When he was considered old enough to stay up a while at those parties, occasionally someone spoke more freely in his hearing than his parents would have liked. One guest would look at the other knocking back glasses of champagne or wine or in some cases hard liquor and comment on their liking for it. _“I’m not drinking it for the taste_!” the second guest, who had been growing increasingly loud and rambunctious as the night wore on, would reply.

Bruce understood the concept. Some people drank for the taste. They appreciated the veritable cornucopia of flavors available to them—sweet, fruity, chocolate, smoky, earthy, hard, bitter. They were looking for something they could appreciate in and of itself—something that could love for the flavor, rather than the affects.

Some people drank for what it did to them. Bruce was honestly unsure whether he fit both categories, or just the second. He couldn’t actually remember what most of what he had drank, since he had begun drinking, tasted like. When he spent so much time, as Tommy would have put it, blitzed out of his skull, little things like what he’d been drinking actually tasted like tended to seep out of his mind by the following morning.

…And with that, yes, Bruce recognized that he was probably merely the second category, rather than any kind of combination. He didn’t care. He did _not_ care. There was nothing left to worry about, nothing at all.

(He was finding, albeit only hazily, given how little he tended to remember the following morning, that he was at his happiest when there was so much alcohol coursing through his veins to make even remembering his name somewhat beyond his reach. When the letters and syllables dropped off the ledge into the abyss, he was truly free.)

There was nothing left to worry about.

Someone—Bruce had never asked who—had decided to throw a party in a warehouse on the outskirts of the Narrows. Said party had lasted late into the night and had only fizzled out when the sound system for the host’s music had suddenly died. Without music, the warehouse lost what charm and warmth it had had. Shadowy, cavernous, and entirely too _large_ , party-goers stared into the darkness with unease dripping in beads from their foreheads. Plastic cups still half-filled with beer were left overturned on the floor; someone’s jacket had been abandoned, dangling over the edge of a countertop.

Plastic cups and jackets might have been forgotten, but whoever had brought the beer had remembered to pack it up and take it with them. With the taps run dry, the party was well and truly over. Bruce left last of all, lingering in the dark for what felt like an eternity upon wobbly feet, wondering fuzzily if he might not sleep on the floor and spare himself the trouble of having to drive home. Staring into the yawning dark, increasingly consumed by the idea that something was waiting for him, just out of sight, until he found himself driven out to the street.

He couldn’t remember where he had parked his car. Come to mention it, Bruce couldn’t remember which car he had driven to get here. He had the keys in his hand, was fumbling with them as he tottered down a sidewalk, but he couldn’t remember which of his cars they went with. Why did he have so many cars again? He had so many that it would have been impossible to drive them all in the space of a week.

Bruce frowned. That was an odd thought. He’d never stopped to wonder about all those cars before. It was… They’d been his parents’. They had… Why should he wonder about all those cars, anyways?

As he made his way into the night, the streets constricted, growing narrower and narrower, and all the time more crowded. Central arteries teemed with throngs of people who walked huddled close together for warmth, while solitary travelers stepped out from veins and capillaries so narrow that they must have struggled to press through. Everywhere Bruce looked, there were people who were trying to get… he wasn’t sure where. He couldn’t quite remember why anyone would be going anywhere in the Narrows, the answer dancing just out of reach; certainly, no one looked particularly happy to be here, faces drawn in frowns, shoulders hunched, noses buried in fraying, threadbare scarves.

Bruce’s nose was assaulted with a concoction of so many different smells—burgers cooking in a food stall, soba noodles cooking in another food stall, motor oil, sweat, acrid smoke, fetid garbage in overflowing dumpsters and a faint but unmistakable odor of human excrement. His stomach lurched, his gorge rising in his throat. Even after swallowing down, his stomach still felt like a crucible for molten steel, the taste of bile lingering on the roof of his mouth. Dazzling lights burst and twinkled in his eyes, street lamps and neon signs and car headlights that struck his eyes like lightning. The wind cut into his face like a clumsily wielded razor, though Bruce was only distantly aware of it.

He couldn’t take two steps without bumping into someone, realizing that he was about to collide with them half a second before he could have stopped or stepped aside. Most skittered away without giving a muttered “Excuse me” or even acknowledging that he had been there at all. A few glared, but said nothing, and kept on walking, reaching their destination being more important than starting a fight.

The more it happened, the more Bruce’s head began to spin. Their faces… He was peering into their faces and they looked… They looked… He was drawing hard, gasping breaths, straining to find any air at all in his lungs. These people… He didn’t know these people. He’d never seen them before; he wasn’t so drunk as to forget _that_ , too. But their faces, _their faces_ …

At last, the inevitable happened: he walked into someone who wasn’t substantial enough to stay upright when a drunk teenager stumbled into them.

As the crumbling sidewalk lurched up to meet him, everything went dark, all sensation lost. Consciousness returned to him in the form of a jolt of pain when he hit the sidewalk, but everything was blurred and too-bright, and sound came to him as if he had plunged underwater.

Someone was clutching at his arm, pressing their hand to the middle of his back. They were saying something to him, but all he could see was a blurred face, and he couldn’t hear a word of it.

-0-0-0-

His head felt like someone had been beating it with fists covered with boxing gloves. That was the first thought that arose in Bruce’s bleary mind when next he came to: he felt as though a boxer had gone to town on his head, all night long.

His second thought was that he was neither at home, in his car, nor waking up in a GCPD drunk tank.

Bruce tried to sit up, but too sharply; the world spun on its axis, and he collapsed with a groan back onto whatever it was he’d been lying on. Not a bed, to his relief; waking up in a strange bed had, the last time it happened, been about as comfortable as diving into a swimming pool fully-clothed. (Tommy joked. Bruce smiled, and couldn’t see anything funny about it.) No, he was lying on a couch, a couch that sagged dangerously under his weight and smelled faintly of mothballs.

Slowly, with more care to his head, Bruce sat back up, leaning heavily against the back of the couch and trying to get a better sense of his surroundings—which would likely be easier if he could move his head in either direction without feeling like he was being stabbed, but he’d just have to work with what was in front of him. Which wasn’t much; if Bruce had to guess, he was in somebody’s living room, but there was no television, no other furniture, no lamps, no potted plants, _nothing_ between him and the wall on the far side of the room. The carpet was some pale color that Bruce didn’t have enough light to give a name to. It was stained and torn, buckling at the point where it met the wall. The wallpaper was slashed and rippling, giving the impression of being underwater. All was dark but for a patch of golden light on the wall carved into quarters by the shadow of a window frame.

Bruce dug around in his pockets for his key, his phone and his wallet, and to his relief found them all, and found that nothing had been taken out of the latter. At least whoever had taken him off the street wasn’t a thief.

(There was a thief he knew, but he was trying not to think about her right now. Thinking about her was like thinking about--)

But who _had_ taken him off the street? If Bruce had to guess, he was still in the Narrows; this place had the same scrabbling desperation, so omnipresent as to soak the very walls, as what he’d grown accustomed to after all his visits to the Narrows. Not one of his friends’ houses or penthouse apartments; none of his friends lived in accommodations like this. The whole place had a hospital smell to it, stale air and musty formaldehyde, with an undertone of something Bruce had no name for, but recoiled from on reflex.

He nursed his screaming head in his hands, hissing through his teeth. Why hadn’t he just called for a cab? He could have been home by now, and sent—

The thought shriveled to dust in his mind before it could reach completion, Bruce swayed in his seat, taking a thick, gasping breath.

“If you’re gonna puke, use the bucket.”

At the sudden rise of an unfamiliar voice, Bruce whirled around, for which his head did not thank him, and neither did his eyes, for he was met with light so bright as to blind him. When Bruce’s eyes refocused and his brain stopped screeching long enough to process what he was seeing, he was looking into a kitchen space. There were warped cabinet doors and a deeply scratched countertop. A very old microwave and an equally Paleolithic toaster oven sat side-by-side, and a mini-fridge sat where, judging by the gap, a much-larger refrigerator was supposed to be.

There was a small, rickety kitchen table, and at that table sat a boy. He was pale and thin, with shaggy brown hair that curled around his jaw. He was eating out of a bowl of cereal and staring at Bruce like he’d just threatened to break all of his windows.

“What?” Bruce asked stupidly, struggling to blink unforgiving sunlight out of his eyes.

The boy narrowed his eyes. “The bucket, the one right by your feet.” Gingerly, Bruce turned his head long enough to catch sight of a bright blue industrial bucket, the kind you saw in janitors’ carts. “I put that there so you’d throw up into _it_ instead of the couch or the carpet,” he said sharply.

“If you’re so worried about keeping this place clean, why did you bring me here at all?” Bruce snapped. “And why would you be worried about one more stain on this carpet, anyways? It’s already filthy.”

The boy regarded him in chilly silence, his mouth pressed tightly shut. He pointed towards a door off to Bruce’s right. “If you want to leave, the way out’s right over there,” he told him, cold and quiet. “Nothing’s stopping you. If you’d rather sleep off your hangover in an alley, that’s fine by me.” He went back to eating his cereal, acting for all the world as though Bruce wasn’t there.

As quickly as he had puffed up, Bruce deflated, sagging into the couch. He had the distinct feeling that he wouldn’t be in a position to complain if the boy had let him go on his way and he’d wound up sleeping in an alley.

When Bruce stood up, he felt as though the contents of his skull were trying to tie themselves into knots, but his legs weren’t as wobbly as he’d been afraid they’d be. He went and sat down at the only other chair at the table, noting as he did so the spots of rust on the faucet of the kitchen sink and on the eyes on the stove. The surface of the table wasn’t level, slanting a little to one side. The boy didn’t look up, continuing to eat his cereal (dry Cheerios) as if he was alone. He stirred the dry cereal with his spoon; when his long, bony fingers caught the light pouring in through the window, the skin looked translucent, veins showing clear as day.

“I’m sorry,” Bruce said awkwardly, staring at the top of the boy’s head. Despite his current difficulties, he sat as straight as his spine would allow. “I… get irritable when I’m hungover.”

“Obviously,” the boy replied, with a mostly-even tone that nonetheless carried a noticeable bite.

It was warmer here than it had been by the couch. The heat was making Bruce’s head spin, his gorge starting to rise in his throat. He swallowed hard, took a breath that did nothing to either calm him or make him feel less like he was going to vomit, but despite that, he tried, “I… I know you didn’t have to do what you did. …Thank you.”

His friends had scattered once the party was over. Fair enough; it was late and it was cold, and they must have wanted to go home. But he had still been alone when he wandered deeper and deeper into the Narrows.

At that, the boy looked up, fixing Bruce in a silent stare. He had bluish-gray eyes, too-bright and piercing, knowing to an unnerving extent. Finally, he ducked his head and mumbled, “Yeah, well, you look like you’re younger than me. You don’t want to be out too late by yourself.” He gestured at Bruce with a wave of the hand—cautious, arm tucked close to his chest. “Not when you’re wearing clothes anyone’s gonna know are expensive.”

“Right.” Unsure of what else to do, Bruce stuck his hand out over the table for the other boy to shake. “I’m Bruce.”

The boy stared at Bruce’s hand, brow furrowed. “It’s…” He licked his lips. “It’s… Jonathan.” He raised an eyebrow. “Are you _sure_ your name’s Bruce?”

Bruce pulled his hand back. “Yes.” He frowned, just a little defensive. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Jonathan shrugged, the shadow of a smirk hovering over his seemingly perpetually-downturned mouth. “Last night, when I tried asking you your name, you kept telling me you didn’t have one. You were pretty insistent about it, actually.”

Bruce’s face burned. “That’s… That’s just…”

“Weird shit people say when they’re drunk?” Jonathan supplied. There was an odd glimmer in his eyes that was something like snow on a sidewalk, right before a car rolled by and dirtied it with muddy water.

Relieved to have been supplied an easy explanation, Bruce nodded. “Yeah, stupid things I say when I’m drunk. My name’s Bruce. Bruce Wayne.” His head began to throb anew.

Jonathan peered into his face. “ _Rich kid_ Bruce Wayne?” he asked skeptically.

“Yes.” Nodding proved to be a mistake. Stars burst in Bruce’s eyes, accompanied by pain that seemed nearly to cleave his skull in two. He clutched at his forehead, groaning, fingernails digging into flesh. He hissed. He’d never had a hangover this bad before; had he really drank so much last night?

Without a word, Jonathan got up from the table and disappeared down a hallway curtained with black shadow. Bruce heard a door open, then silence.

He stared into the darkness, feeling increasingly light-headed. The longer he was alone, staring into shadow, the more his heart began to pound. It was foolish to think the way he was, he knew, (regretfully) sober, that he was entertaining fantasies. But he kept expecting the darkness to take on form and animation, expected something lean and hungry to rip out his throat, and he had seen so many fantastical things over the last couple of years that he wasn’t willing to discount anything anymore.

(His flesh had withered and crumbled as if he had aged thousands of years in a day, millennia worth of desiccation catching up with him all at once. His wasted jaw yawned open, until the bones themselves must have crumbled—but Bruce still dreamed of being there again, still caught himself imagining those bones still lying entombed beneath Blackgate, waiting for the moment of his return. The empty eye sockets bore into his face, ripping apart like tissue paper every mask Bruce put up to keep his secrets hidden away. Even after death, even after he’d crumbled to dust, _he_ still knew him, as if he could peer directly into his mind.)

When the shadows shifted, Bruce started, his blood roaring in his ears. For a moment, he saw something in the shadows that seemed barely human, unnaturally long and stretched, but a moment later his eyes cleared and it was only Jonathan, restored to human flesh and normal proportions. He held a glass of water and a small bottle that rattled in his hand. “I’m afraid rich kid Bruce Wayne,” he mumbled, wrestling with the bottle cap until it finally gave and he was able to tap two white pills onto the table, “is just gonna have to settle for plain old Tylenol.”

After taking a discreet look at the bottle (it really wouldn’t have done to be slipped Ecstasy or something stronger than that), Bruce couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief. “Thank you,” Bruce murmured, quickly swallowing back the pills. He took a few more gulps of water after that. The water was hard and bore an unattractive copper undertone, but for the headache, it helped alleviate the pain, even if only a little. At the very least, he felt a little less like he was going to vomit at any moment.

Jonathan blinked rapidly, his face contorting. “Don’t thank me.” The words came out fast, almost stumbling over each other. “If you died in here the cops would be all over this place. I _don’t_ want cops in here,” he added darkly.

Bruce might have protested, but he’d heard about what some members of the GCPD had been doing in the Narrows, especially when Professor Pyg was still on the loose. Much as he might be loath to admit it, he could understand why Jonathan didn’t want the police in his home.

Something about what he’d said had pulled on another thread, one that had Bruce looking around the kitchen and living room for a sign, any sign, that someone else lived here with his ‘host.’ “So…” His pulse jumped in his throat. “…Are you here by yourself?”

A soft, shaky, bitter laugh escaped Jonathan’s mouth. “Yeah.” He looked away, jaw clenched and eyes like glass. “We…” He peered back at Bruce’s face, head slightly bowed. “…We moved up here from Georgia when I was seven; my mom got a job offer. Things… things didn’t work out like we’d thought they would.”

Unbidden, Bruce remembered Selina claiming her mother was a secret agent and would be coming back for her someday, what felt like an eternity ago. He was remembering the first time he had seen her home, that poor, ramshackle place. Briefly, he had wondered how anyone could bear to live here, let alone go back to sleep there every night. He had wondered how anyone could survive living like that by themselves.

(What he couldn’t remember, though, was just what sort of face Selina had worn when she had first shown him her home. Had she been defensive, defiant, ashamed, utterly uncaring of his reaction? There were cobwebs where her face should have been. Why, _why_ couldn’t he remember?

How long had it been since he’d last seen her? Weeks, months? She had been, at the time, ultimately working to further… _his_ interests, but Bruce had gotten the impression that Selina hadn’t exactly known who her boss’s employer was. Where was she now, anyways? What was she doing, nowadays?)

“…I’m sorry.”

Jonathan’s face twisted. “ _Why_?” he demanded, narrowing his eyes as he stared searchingly into Bruce’s face.

“I just am.”

Jonathan regarded him in silence, suspicion etched into his face, something sharp and overly bright in his eyes. He drew back in his chair and said nothing.

They sat in silence for Bruce wasn’t sure how long. He was struck by how quiet it was, actually. They were in an apartment building, they _had_ to be. Buildings in the Narrows tended to have poor sound insulation. Around this time of morning, he should have been able to hear the myriad sounds associated with the people in the surrounding apartments waking up. Slamming doors, water coursing through the pipes, footsteps overhead, he heard none of it, only a silence that grew more yawning with each passing moment. It was especially jarring after so many consecutive nights spent at parties with music so loud it made his teeth rattle.

Jonathan stared down into his half-eaten bowl of cereal, stirring it with his spoon, but never lifting the spoon to his mouth. Trying to decide whether to eat any more of it was apparently so engrossing that he didn’t care that he was under scrutiny (Or, more likely, he just didn’t care). The silence made little difference to him, it seemed.

At last, Bruce stood, wincing, but not in as much pain as he had been in—the Tylenol was starting to take effect, even if only a little bit. He tried, in vain, to straighten his rumpled shirt and jacket. “I have to be heading home.” He stared down at the top of Jonathan’s head, his stomach starting to churn, but somehow, Bruce didn’t think that was due to what he had drank last night. “Thank you again.”

“Hmm.” Jonathan didn’t look up. “Try not to get mugged,” he said, in a slightly milder tone than he had used before.

“I don’t think that will be a problem.” Alfred had thought he was getting rusty, but Bruce still remembered the basics, and Alfred wasn’t _here_ , was he?

As comfortable as Jonathan seemed to be with ignoring Bruce while he was sitting right in front of him, Bruce could feel his eyes boring into his back as he left. His skin prickled.

As he was exiting the building, Bruce took stock of his surroundings. The hallway and narrow, badly lit stairwell had the same air of neglect as the interior of Jonathan’s apartment, torn wallpaper and battered doors and stained, ripped-up carpet. The floor was littered with empty bottles, torn-up newspaper and magazines, and dead cockroaches that made a sickening crunch underfoot. A miasmic odor of mildew, discarded garbage and spoiled food permeated the air; Bruce felt as though his stomach was trying to crawl out of his body through his mouth.

He wondered how much effort it must take to keep an apartment relatively clean in a place like this. He wondered how much effort it took to live in a place like this. He heard Selina practically going into raptures about the water pressure in Wayne Manor, he saw Ivy wandering around town pale and sick and glaring, he remembered being hungry all the time when he was living in the Narrows with Selina. It just… Memories were the constant companions of his sobriety. It shouldn’t have surprised him.

-0-0-0-

Around a week later, Bruce found himself back there again. Not drunk, not at night. He’d needed to figure out where he was before he could figure out how to get to his car, and that had given him a good idea of how to come back.

The building was condemned; why anyone would stay here, Bruce didn’t know. He knocked on the door, and for so long heard only silence that he wondered if Jonathan wasn’t staying here anymore after all. But after several minutes, he heard a faint shuffling sound by the door, and the clink of a chain being unlatched.

Jonathan opened the door just enough for his face to be fully visible. He stared incredulously down at Bruce. “What are _you_ doing here?”

Bruce held out a plastic bag. “I brought you this.” He grimaced. “It’s not much, but I don’t really cook, and I don’t know how much room you have in that fridge.”

Jonathan took the bag, but so gingerly that Bruce might as well have told him the bag was full of live grenades. When he stared down at the bag’s contents, he went very still, his face frozen. Bruce watched for _any_ sign of a stronger reaction, feeling increasingly as though this might not have been such a good idea, after all.

Why _had_ he done this, anyways? He really hadn’t gotten the impression that Jonathan wanted him back around here, and it was hardly a pleasant place to hang out. But something had just pulled him back here. A stray urge, something that needed to be pursued, something that wouldn’t stop tugging at the back of his mind until he listened to it. And the only person here didn't seem to care who he was. That helped.

At last, Jonathan murmured, in a tone of abject confusion, “…Thank you?”

He wandered further inside, still staring down into the bag. Quietly, Bruce followed him inside, through the open door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obviously, this is all going to end horribly eventually, but I wanted to see both of these characters interact with new people (and for Jonathan to have positive interactions with _someone_ on this show), so here’s this.


	2. Chapter Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just as a note, I’m aware that the role of Jonathan Crane/Scarecrow was recast following Charlie Tahan leaving the show. My version of the character is drawn from Tahan’s portrayal, his appearance and what little we saw of his character and personality. I’m sure the new guy will do just fine with the material he’s given, but I wrote the first chapter with Tahan in mind, and the rest of the fic (however much I might write) will be written with Tahan in mind as well. Also, the fic diverges from Season 4B. I might take details from 4B as I see how things develop there, but this fic is AU after ‘Queen Takes Knight.’
> 
> Finally, to be frank, this fic is not a top priority for me. It will be updated every once in a while, but don’t expect any kind of regular posting schedule. My main motivation for writing this in the first place was that I wanted to see these two characters interact in _Gotham_ , and interact as something other than enemies. It would probably be easier to work on this fic regularly if I liked _Gotham_ as a show a lot more than I do, but I don’t, so it takes a backseat to other projects.

It was easy to say that he had transcended fear, that he had become something other than what he was, that he was no longer the weak boy who was entombed in Arkham Asylum three years ago. It was easy to say that, easy to boast, when he stood in triumph over Arkham, malignant Warden Reed twisted into a shadow of his own fear and the normally-apathetic staff dead or in flight. But when he fled his tomb back to the living world and was forced to be a part of it once again, things like that were no longer so easy to say, or to live.

Jonathan didn’t leave Arkham penniless, not really. Before that… that man had shown up, before he had left, he had tried to take some steps to ensure he would be free for more than just a few days. What personal identification he had that had fallen into Arkham’s possession, he had recovered and taken with him. As for money, well, the cash he’d stolen from the staff members’ wallets after sending them fleeing or gibbering had been of greater help to him than the staff themselves had ever been. It had felt… When he had gone digging through their wallets and pocketbooks for cash, it had felt… No. He wasn’t going to dwell on it. It had been primarily pragmatism that he led him to leave their credit cards alone; pragmatism, that was what it had been. He was _not_ going to get caught because the cops traced a stolen credit card back to him.

He had… He didn’t like to think about how much (or how little, in the grand scheme of things) money he had for food. Mercifully, there were enough abandoned buildings in the Narrows (and abandoned buildings where someone, for whatever reason, had forgotten to turn off the power) that finding a place to stay hadn’t been a problem. He’d gone deep into the Narrows, found a place where the cops rarely went (afraid, no doubt), and disappeared into to what to outsiders was a homogeneous mass of human trash, not worth sparing a concerned thought for—so it wasn’t as though Jonathan was in any worse shape than he’d been before.

He had disappeared, and to good end. On the rare occasion that Jonathan was able to get his hands on a newspaper or listen to local news reports, he never saw his name in print or heard it spoken aloud— _either_ of his names. As soon as the Scarecrow had been born, it had been forgotten by the people and the place that birthed it. (Warden Reed likely remembered him, but if so, he wasn’t talking. Jonathan remembered him, too, much as he wished he didn’t.) This city was hardly what anyone could call a good mother—as soon as she gave birth to her children, she forgot about them, and did not know them when they called on her.

 _Do I even count as one of her children_? he wondered from time to time. Did the twisted creatures born in lightless places, brought to light like the squirming things that lived under rocks were brought to light by curious children thoughtless of the harm they might do, did things like that really count as children? Maybe he would be better off having no—

No. He’d had parents. When he was a different person, he’d had parents. Or was he still someone who had had parents, once? It was… It was hard to tell. What was certain was that he didn’t have parents anymore, and however much the city might have shaped him, he knew she would not claim him. Gotham never claimed the twisted things she forged. She only turned her back. Jonathan had been in Arkham long enough to know that. He had seen it play out, over and over again.

A formula, a chemical grocery list and a voice in the back of his mind, a shadow on the wall, those were what Jonathan had in place of parents now. His mother was long gone, her body consumed by fire and her memory distorted and devoured by his father’s ob— He stopped himself. His father hadn’t… His father hadn’t…

He had to carry on his father’s work. He _had_ to. The body might have been dead ( _shot full of holes while he watched and some twisted shadow of a man stood over him_ ), but some piece of his father was still alive, and it resided in his work. If he wanted to keep it alive, he _had_ to carry on the work. But that wasn’t so simple.

Jonathan’s father had had two formulae for the serum. There was one, the one that produced stronger results, that relied on harvesting human adrenal glands. There was another, one that had been discarded once his father had hit upon the idea of m… of harvesting those glands. The effects of that serum weren’t quite as potent, didn’t last quite as long, but it didn’t need any _human_ materials to put together, just the right combination of chemicals. It wasn’t paid for in blood, and thus was weaker, but it still did the job.

The latter of the two formulae was the one Jonathan had used when he was… working for ( _sold to_ ) Merton and his men. He had been unwilling to ever closely examine the second formula his father had come up with, and a part of him had been afraid that if he told those men that the strongest possible serum required you to, well, to harvest human adrenal glands to create it, they wouldn’t have thought that any real obstacle.

The latter formula, though weaker, did the job it was supposed to do, but still, _still_ , there was a fatal flaw, one that Jonathan could not for the life of him figure out how to remedy.

He wasn’t sure what had happened back in Arkham. All he could suppose from watching the policeman douse the other inmates with a fire extinguisher was that the serum, when applied as a gas rather than injected (Jonathan rubbed his forearm reflexively, before realizing what he was doing and jerking his hand away), dissolved in water and lost any effectiveness. He couldn’t make any more guesses than that, because, well…

The room in the abandoned apartment that he was using as a bedroom had only one window, east-facing. When daylight started to flee over the western horizon, night came for this room faster than it came for the rest of the city. The streetlamps and neon signs outside provided some light, but only so much. He held a dim, flickering little flashlight close to the pages, dog-eared and weather-stained as they were (he was still in the process of copying them onto new paper; it was… it was taking time), and stared over the information found there, a leaden weight growing ever heavier in his chest.

Jonathan knew a bit about chemistry. He’d liked it ever since he was little, and there had been those impromptu _lessons_ his father had given him. He knew a bit about chemistry; what he knew was burned into memory, the scarring unlikely to fade any time soon. But that was just it. He knew a bit about chemistry. He didn’t know a lot. He’d been in ninth grade when he was sent to Arkham. He hadn’t taken chemistry yet. He could remember what ingredients were needed to produce the serum, and what amount and order was needed. Some of the simpler parts of the formula, he understood. But much of it was completely indecipherable, as if written in a foreign language—and much of it was scrawled on the pages rather than written neatly, which didn’t help.

Jonathan had spent many a night staring at his father’s notes for hours at a time, weary and red-eyed, willing himself to better understand it. Willing his brain to suddenly contain the information he needed, and the means to fix whatever fault there was in the formula. He inevitably ended up wanting to take the notebook and throw it against the wall, a scream of frustration, but it was better than other ways he could have been spending his nights.

 _Having trouble, Johnny?_ That too-familiar, rattling, desiccated voice whispered in his ear. If Jonathan held very still and held his breath, he could feel hands settling heavily on his shoulders, cold and sharp. Long, gnarled fingernails dug into his flesh, so sharp that Jonathan could have imagined blood, but it was such a gentle touch that he leaned into it, swallowing hard. _You’d better figure it out quick. If you don’t, there’ll be nothing to stop them when they come to throw you back in Arkham._

“I know that,” he mumbled, fisting his hand in his hair.

 _No, you don’t. If you did, you wouldn’t be so calm. You know, old Warden Reed’s probably_ never _gonna let you go._ Jonathan’s heart proceeded to try its best to crawl out of his body through his throat, twisting itself into some shriveled, hideous shape in its eagerness to escape. _So why don’t you just be a good boy and figure out what’s wrong?_

It had changed shapes since Jonathan had first put on that mask, what might have been years or days ago. No longer did it look like a scarecrow (Small mercies). It was a shadow on the wall, shifting and formless. Pale light from the dim street lamps and distant neon signs washed over the opposite wall from the window like milk, and the patch of darkness in the light that shouldn’t have existed, that was where it lived now. It had changed form, but gained a voice in the process. Not a voice it exercised often, but still, a voice fit to pull him to pieces if it ever chose to do so.

For now, it used its voice to needle Jonathan. But perhaps that was for the best. He didn’t need to forget what would happen to him if he failed.

When he had worn a mask and held Arkham by the throat, his father’s killer cowering at his feet, it had been easy to say that he had transcended fear. When he fled Arkham and put the mask away, to his shame, fear found him again. Try as he might not to feel it, it dogged his steps everywhere he went. Whenever Jonathan took to the streets after dark to buy food, he kept the hood of his sweatshirt up over his head (until he found a bodega or a gas station, at which point the cashier’s fears compelled him to pull it away) and flinched away from car lights, and ducked into alleyways whenever those lights happened to be flashing red and blue, holding his breath until they were gone. Whenever he heard a shout, he flinched; on the occasion gunfire peppered the air, he felt as though breaking his bones to fashion himself into something small would have been more comfortable than donning the mask again. Whenever he was at ‘home’ and he heard a thump, he snatched up what was left of the serum, swallowing down bile, wondering if the cops had found him at last.

When Jonathan had worn a mask and held Arkham by the throat, it had been easy to say that he had left fear behind him, that he had become something that didn’t feel it at all—even if that thing was twisted into strange shapes, unrecognizable as human, it was so freeing to be _that_ instead of what he had been before. But he wasn’t the thing that had held Arkham by the throat right now. He was just Jonathan Crane, and if Jonathan Crane wanted to avoid being dragged off to Arkham and immured so far down he’d never see daylight again, he needed to be a shadow. Just one of the shadows of Gotham City, something other than human too, but weaker, not stronger.

He thought he could live with being a shadow, if it meant being free; at least he’d taken refuge in a place where anyone from the outside thought of the residents as something beneath notice—whether as shadows, or just trash. He certainly wasn’t any worse off than he had been in Arkham. Being in the spotlight had spelled pain in there, and being in the spotlight had spelled pain out here; anonymity sounded wonderful, right now. He could sink into the shadows and shape himself anew, with no one to try to drag him out again, no one to stand and gawk, no one to bear witness to the in-between. That sounded… it really sounded wonderful, right about now.

And when Gotham City had completely forgotten about him, when it forgot that his name was carved into the foundations and its being was carved into his bones, he would come back.

He would return, and show himself as something that had truly transcended fear. He would return, and make them all see the world as he had seen it. Maybe then—

But it was useless daydreaming about the future when he couldn’t even figure out what was wrong with that damned _formula_.

He had to figure out what was going wrong.

Not for the first time, Jonathan wound his fingers into his hair and groaned. He had to figure out what was wrong. (Rather difficult, considering the his knowledge of chemistry consisted of the hours he’d spent as a child playing with a chemistry set, and the _lessons_ his father had taught him. But he’d figure it out. He had to.)

It was random coincidence that Jonathan ran into (well, was run into by) a drunk boy who claimed not to have a name one cold night. Why he had dragged the boy back with him to his home, he was still having a hard time figuring out. For all that Gotham seemed to have forgotten him, he still risked exposure doing this. What if this boy turned out to be some sort of true crime freak and had heard about his “escape” from Arkham? What if he came to in the morning and recognized his _face_?

It hadn’t been worth the risk. It really hadn’t been. But Jonathan, still sitting on the chilly pavement, had watched the other boy try and fail to get back to his feet, a frown stealing over his face. This really wasn’t a good idea. If the boy happened to recognize him, he’d likely sell him out to the cops as soon as blink. At the same time, Jonathan hadn’t been recognized once in all the time he’d been free (Except by people he wanted to recognize him). And he couldn’t quite tell himself that the boy would be alright outside on his own all night.

 _This is a mistake_ , Jonathan thought sourly, even as he dragged the boy upright and tried in vain to get his name, trying not to knock into anyone again (No mean feat, considering the sort of people out at this time of night in the Narrows were typically too focused on getting to their destination to really care about bumping into other people, and occasionally stepped on those other people directly). _He’s gonna puke on my clothes, he’s gonna puke all over the carpet; he probably won’t even be grateful in the morning._

Well, he was half-right. The boy had just enough sense left to lurch away from Jonathan on the occasions that he threw up while Jonathan was walking him back to his apartment. In the morning, he wasn’t at first the picture of gratitude (to put it mildly), but to Jonathan’s shock, he actually conceded to criticism rather than becoming defensive.

Perhaps someone else would have cared more that they had Bruce Wayne, a quasi-celebrity, asleep on their couch. Jonathan cared little, except to mark himself relieved that rich kid Bruce Wayne clearly had no idea who he was. He left with the last vestiges of night trailing after him, and Jonathan watched him go, _I don’t have a name, I don’t have a name, I don’t have a name_ ringing in his ears.

He frowned, and caught himself wondering if the kid would be able to find his way home without running afoul of a mugger or falling off a bridge. But the defining problem of his life was calling him, and Jonathan banished the thoughts with an irritated sigh. The rich led charmed lives; if nothing else, rich kid Bruce Wayne could always call a cab. He’d be fine, and whether or not he was fine wasn’t really Jonathan’s problem, now was it? His problems were something rather more pressing than that.

And it wasn’t like Bruce Wayne was ever going to come back around here again. Who would want to come back here if they had a choice about it?

Perhaps he had misjudged the situation.

Jonathan could say nothing as he stared at the contents of the plastic bag he had been handed. Dimly, he was aware that Bruce had followed him back inside the apartment, but it wasn’t something he could find it in himself to be concerned about. The bag…

It should have been a paltry gift. A bag full of boxes of nutrient bars and a package of gold fish and Oreos and some cartons of microwavable macaroni and cheese, the latter of which smelled so strongly of cheese powder that Jonathan wondered if the seal on one of them had been punctured. Honestly, it was kind of paltry, and with no idea why Bruce had done it, more than a little suspect, but still, Jonathan sat the bag down on the countertop and didn’t tell Bruce to leave.

He turned round and eyed Bruce, who was standing gingerly in the living room as if he expected the floor to swallow him up at any moment (If so, Jonathan knew the feeling—he really did—but under other circumstances he might have told Bruce to consider it a blessing if the floor actually did swallow him up). Jonathan had had this place to himself for weeks and weeks now, and not having to worry about being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night and taken to the warden’s office had felt… good. Good enough that he wasn’t certain he cared to have someone else here, not even someone who had brought him food.

Jonathan blinked, frowning. “Sit down,” he said, not sharply, not quite.

Bruce shot a leery look at the couch, bypassing it to take a seat at the kitchen table.

After a moment’s enjoyment of the much greater height difference he enjoyed when he was standing and Bruce sitting, Jonathan sat down in the chair opposite his. His fingers went to drum on the table, but he realized a moment later what he was doing and quieted his hand, pressing it flat on the table.

The high-pitched wail of a car horn sounded far below them, faint and wavering, before subsiding into nothingness. The wind battered on the kitchen window, but it came in fitful spurts and couldn’t keep the silence at bay for long. Jonathan watched Bruce out of slightly narrowed eyes—

_“So, what’s your name?” Jonathan asked as he, huffing and puffing, his own legs wobbling dangerously under the other boy’s weight, pulled him upright. A name was… There was a line of thought he didn’t want to walk down, but another that was easier: a name was a starting point and an anchor both. A name would make this a little easier._

_“I don’t have a name,” was the slurred response. The boy clutched at his jacket with fumbling fingers, trying to push away from him, but the alcohol had sapped whatever strength he might have possessed when sober, and it was like a blade of grass growing arms and trying to push over an oak tree. Or something like that. Considering that Jonathan was hardly any more substantial than him—might have been a little less—that was honestly a little pathetic._

_“Yes, you do,” Jonathan muttered, taking a step forwards and immediately having to grab at a nearby lamp post to keep from falling over. He shot a hard glare at the other boy, adjusting his weight_ again _to try to find some sort of balance, and wrinkling his nose when he caught a whiff of beer on the other boy’s breath. “Your mom named you when you were born, or somebody else did. It’s kinda hard to live this long without a name.”_

_Though one could certainly lose their name._

_“Don’t have a name, don’t have a name, don’t have a name.”_

_There was an off-kilter note of desperation that made Jonathan pause, frowning deeply down at the other boy’s dark-haired head. “Okay,” he said slowly. “Drunk you doesn’t have a name. What about_ sober _you?”_

_“Don’t have a name don’t have a name don’thaveaname.”_

_And on and on until it was just noise, no more meaningful than the rumble of a car engine._

—uncertain of what to think, about any of this.

“So…” Bruce’s eyes darted from Jonathan’s face to the buckling kitchen floor tiles, to the dirty window, to the water stain-dappled ceiling above, back to Jonathan’s face with something furtive like cringing shame trying to avoid scrutiny. “…How long have you lived here?”

Jonathan’s fingernails scrabbled frenetically against the knees of his soft, worn jeans. “…A while.” Those fingernails, ragged from gnawing teeth, bit into his skin through the denim. “How long have you been trying to be nameless?” Little sparks of pain shot across his skin; Jonathan wondered idly if he was drawing blood, before dismissing it as unimportant. “That’s a more interesting question.”

 _Curiosity killed the cat_. That voice was almost sing-song, as sing-song as dry leaves rattling on a rough concrete sidewalk or long, gnarled fingernails on a chalkboard could ever be. _And if you get tossed back in Arkham, satisfaction is not going to bring it back._

His father had killed people, and he had been sprung ~~sold~~ out of Arkham, and then he’d gone back and held it by the throat for a little while. Assaulted a cop ~~murderer~~. Escaped again. Some news station or paper, somewhere, had to have tried to show the world his face. He’d be recognized eventually. Bruce would recognize him eventually if he hung around him long enough—if he hadn’t recognized him already. If he wasn’t just toying with him.

Jonathan bit back a sigh. Okay, so curiosity killed the cat. That hardly stopped the cat from being curious, now did it?

Either Bruce couldn’t tell when someone was trying to steer a conversation, or he was deliberately treating that as a legitimate question. Or perhaps he was a little drunk again, and Jonathan just couldn’t smell the beer this time. “I was drunk,” he protested, eyes drifting back down to the tabletop. “I don’t know why I said that.”

“Maybe you should think about it, then. You might learn something interesting about yourself.”

Bruce’s face almost like someone had paused a VCR, completely frozen. He sucked in a sharp breath and shook his head. “I really don’t think so,” tumbled out of his mouth. He looked away, jaw working, mouth clenched shut.

Well, that just stoked curiosity to a hotter burn, but at the same time, Jonathan felt a stab of pity in his gut. It didn’t last long. Of all the things he had energy for these days, pity wasn’t one of them, at least not the kind of pity that would linger at his side for more than a few minutes. It wasn’t worth it, it really wasn’t, especially not when the people he felt pity for wouldn’t feel pity back, or if it was to be expended on animals, whom Jonathan wasn’t certain were capable of pity at all. It wasn’t worth it when it would be nothing but a distraction.

But it was still involuntary, and it still crept up on him at odd moments. Rich kid Bruce Wayne probably had little use for Jonathan Crane’s pity, but Jonathan couldn’t think of a reason for rich kid Bruce Wayne to be wandering the Narrows falling down drunk and claiming he didn’t have a name that wouldn’t inspire just a momentary stab of pity.

 _Careful, Johnny. Don’t want to forget what’s important here_.

Jonathan eyed the bags of groceries on the countertop. “You wanna go outside?” he asked suddenly.

“What?” Bruce’s eyes flickered in blank confusion.

“I’m not saying you should leave.” Jonathan raked his fingernails over the tabletop. “Do you wanna go outside. It’s nic—“ He paused and grimaced. “It’s not raining out there. The air smells a little better.”

He’d cleaned this place up as best he could when he first moved in, wishing desperately to feel a little less like a squatter in an abandoned building. But by the time he was done, there were times when he fell asleep—and he didn’t sleep much, but sleep still found him sometimes, no matter how he might hide from it—and when he woke up in the middle of the night, he forgot where he was, and there was that horrible moment when he expected Warden Reed to reach down and rip the blanket off of his bed and tell him to get up, he was going on a trip…

But he wasn’t in Arkham anymore, and Bruce Wayne was, whatever else he might be, a far cry from Warden Reed. And he was awake. The sunlight was too harsh on his eyes for him to be sleeping. He wasn’t in Arkham anymore. He'd triumphed over Warden Reed, hadn't he? He wasn't in Arkham anymore.

Bruce frowned at him, his eyes slightly narrowed. But when he spoke, his voice was milder than that expression might have suggested. “Sure.”


End file.
